Paul, Alice

Paul, Alice

(1885–1977) social reformer, lawyer; born in Moorestown, N.J. Influenced by her Quaker family, she graduated from Swarthmore (1905) and went on to do graduate work in New York City and England. While in London (1906–09) she worked in a settlement house and was jailed on three occasions for suffragist actions. She took her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912, the same year she became chairperson of the congressional committee of the National American Suffrage Association; impatient with its policies, in 1913 she helped to found the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which merged in 1917 to form the National Woman's Party; she would become this party's chairperson in 1942. After women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment (1920), she devoted herself to gaining equal rights for women and in 1923 introduced the first equal rights amendment in Congress. She had meanwhile studied the law and broadened her field to the international arena, and although she did not live to see an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution, she did get an equal rights affirmation in the preamble to the United Nations charter.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.